Z.ai Powers Up a 1-Gigawatt AI Training Cluster With No Nvidia Chips Inside

Z.ai, the Chinese lab formerly known as Zhipu, has finished building a data center that draws roughly one gigawatt of power and is stocked entirely with domestically made accelerators. It has already begun operating part of the site, Bloomberg reported citing a person familiar with the project. Russian-language technology channels carried the same account, noting that the site will train the company's GLM model family and that Z.ai now operates several compute clusters holding more than 10,000 chips each.

The source did not name the chip supplier, but Z.ai's recent training history suggests Huawei. The company released GLM-5.2 in June, an open-weight model it says was trained without any Nvidia hardware, most likely on Huawei Ascend accelerators. Z.ai has had commercial reason to build a non-Nvidia stack since Washington added it to an export blacklist in January 2025.

The claims come from a single sourced report rather than an independent audit. The specifics that matter most for capability, meaning yield, interconnect bandwidth, and the effective utilization of a cluster this size on Chinese chips, are not disclosed. A gigawatt of nameplate power is not the same as a gigawatt of useful FLOPs. What is verified is the direction: a sanctioned Chinese lab is building frontier-scale compute without American chips and training competitive open-weight models on it.